Sword of Allah

Flores, Indonesia

The Sword of Allah waited at the end of the runway. Hendra had calculated that the runway itself was too short for the drone, when fully loaded with its payload and fuel, to gain enough ground speed for takeoff unless the breeze was fresh and exactly onshore. That, Hendra had warned, would be a rare occurrence indeed, due to a number of factors he’d learned since becoming a meteorological expert. But Hendra also promised those factors were a minor setback.

Duat took him at his word. Had the man not developed an electronic brain for the drone that made it fly as if an invisible pilot was at the controls? That in itself was miraculous. Duat cast his eye over the aircraft as Hendra and his young assistant wheeled it from the hangar. The Sword of Allah was considerably larger than any of the aircraft Hendra had been testing to date. And it was certainly in far better shape now than when it had arrived in a box crate from Latakia, Syria. It had been delivered in pieces, the whole roughly cut up with a saw. Looking at it now, that was difficult to believe. What had Hendra said? He’d used carbon fibre and Kevlar obtained from shipwrights in Denpasar to rebuild the wing’s mainspar and fuselage. He said he’d avoided using aircraft technology so as to keep the questions to a minimum.

Duat ran his fingertips lightly over a wing. He could barely feel the join. ‘Hendra, you are a wizard,’ he said. ‘Babu Islam owes you a great debt.’

‘Thank you, Emir.’

‘May Allah reward you amply.’

Hendra smiled. For the moment, appreciation from Duat was reward enough.

A catapult had been rigged up using a spare outboard motor and it had yet to be tested on the drone itself. A sleigh on skids had been used to determine the loads it was capable of dragging and that had certainly been promising. But a test with the Sword of Allah itself? That had had to be postponed a number of times due to monsoonal activity, but a break in the weather saw the morning dawn with a grey slate sky that turned blue as the orange ball of the sun climbed out of the sea.

The test Hendra was conducting, he’d explained, would not provide all the answers because the Sword of Allah would not be weighed down with its payload or full fuel tanks. If it took off fully loaded, Hendra calculated that it would not then have enough runway on which to land before ploughing into the rocks at the far end. The test was merely to investigate the effectiveness of the catapult, and the drone’s stability as it accelerated down the runway.

Duat had listened to all this and his appreciation transformed into impatience. The suicide squads were trained, Abd’al Mohammed al Rahim had prepared the canisters for insertion in the drone and all, except for the drone itself, was ready. How much more time would Hendra need? And there was a worrisome development within the encampment. A sickness was spreading. Duat himself was having trouble keeping food down. Rahim was no longer capable of work, and his assistant had taken to bed. Indeed, Rahim had become a slave to the white powder and it was doubtful that he would live beyond another two weeks, a race underway between the drug and the cancers that had spread throughout his body, each vying to end his life. But most disturbing of all was the growing certainty that it was only a matter of time before the authorities discovered the location of the encampment.

It had been a couple of weeks since the news media in Australia and the US had announced that the CIA had hunted down the man suspected of being the principal planner behind the US Embassy bombing, Kadar Al-Jahani. Duat thanked Allah that Kadar had been killed rather than taken prisoner and interrogated. But then Duat had seen his own face on news broadcasts linking him with Kadar and the embassy bombing. Duat had laughed at the likeness, making light of his notoriety for the benefit of the men but, privately, he was more than a little concerned. Time was running out. The question was, did they have weeks, days or hours? He’d checked the bank accounts via the Internet. If the infidels were close, they would be frozen. To Duat’s relief, he still had access to them, although there appeared to be considerably less money in them than he’d thought. The money from the heroin sales was being deposited. Perhaps their banker in Sydney was getting greedy. If so, he would have to be killed and a replacement found.

The sound of the outboard motor screaming at full power and the noisy spooling of the cable onto a drum brought Duat abruptly back to the present. He looked down the runway. The Sword of Allah was accelerating quickly and then, suddenly, it appeared to go almost straight up like a missile. The cable fizzed as it snaked through a metal guide and, when the drone was overhead, Hendra yelled, ‘Now!’ Unang flicked a lever that set the motor’s gearbox to neutral. The sudden release of tension on the cable allowed its hook to release from the drone. The aircraft’s Rotax engine was now on its own. Through a remote control box, Hendra set the aircraft on a slow turn over the water and lined it up on the runway. The test was a success.

‘Hendra, we launch in two weeks. Pray for a break in the weather,’ Duat said, turning away. Convulsions gripped his stomach. He stumbled into the scrub and vomited.